Focaal

In a world of rampant inequality, when millions seek out better futures elsewhere, this introduction situates critical experiences of dwelling within recent debates on home and migration. Seeing vulnerability as an active condition, this theme section records the attempts of individuals and groups on the move in fashioning a home despite adverse socio-cultural, economical, and political situations. Our argumentation considers: the imbrication of structural forces and existential power, the complexity of temporal registers across the life course, and the human capacity for home-making. As asylum-seekers, evicted refugees and deprived migrant families struggle to feel at home in precarious circumstances, our ethnographies reveal the violence inflicted by social systems but also the agency of subjects who strive to make the places they inhabit everyday worth living.

This article focuses on how asylum seekers in Norway struggle to create a sense of home within a physical and political environment that puts significant challenges to their efforts to do so. Based on a national survey and fieldwork, we demonstrate that poor housing and the political derived marginality challenge existential and material home-making processes, thus making it an ambiguous and strenuous experience. This view is rooted in a critical phenomenological understanding in which home is built through inter-relational and intersubjective relations that constitute self and senses of belonging and/or estrangement, as well as well-being and mental health. The agentive struggle for home is a crucial aspect of asylum seekers’ experiences of belonging, well-being and mental health, thus being at the heart of questions of social justice.

This article retraces the aftermath of the eviction of a squatted building that took place in Rome (2017). It draws on ethnography among Eritrean and Ethiopian migrants, analyzing their search for home, and critically engages with the concept of vulnerability. It explores how the evictees—hundreds of people living in “vulnerable homes”—coped with this event by relying on community ties and the process of home-making enacted in an otherwise empty setting. It also shows how the language of vulnerability was mobilized as a moral and bureaucratic resource both by public authorities, to select those to protect, and by evicted people, to claim their rights. Vulnerability emerges as an intersubjective space of experience that people learn to navigate and in which anguish and creativity overlap.

Within transnational labor, the working capital of migrants may recoil as aging and disability occur, crushing people's everyday life and aspirations. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork with Indo-Pakistani minorities in Brescia, northern Italy, the author queries “a case for affliction,” seeing the experience of a breadwinner's stroke disrupting his household. While for decades Punjabi diasporas have settled abroad remitting to the homeland, social attainment often remains precarious for first-time movers and their offspring. After 20-year residence in a destination country, a migrant father's collapse rebounds on his kindred, who regrettably turn to local welfare and public housing but also readjust personal desires toward sustainable family care. Intersectional analysis abets the participants’ narratives in challenging any set “sense of inequality,” embodied, and embedded in run-of-the-mill racialized capitalism.

In the spring of 2014, an unprecedented wave of police raids swept over every lower-class (sha‘abi) neighborhood across Morocco. Dubbed “Operation Tcharmil,” the raids targeted young, lower-class men that matched viral online images in which track-suit-wearing teens boastfully displayed status objects and white weapons. Drawing on the theoretical apparatus of the “affective turn,” in this article I unpack the structural and historical factors that shaped both popular reactions and policing actions toward the sudden, online visibility of a politically and economically disenfranchised group. I situate this episode within current debates about the entanglement of neoliberal disciplinary regimes and the reproduction of particular social orders, and argue that attention to such outbursts can help us revitalize and rethink existing notions of class.

This article opens a conversation between anthropological studies of the Mediterranean and of postsocialism in order to propose the notion of a “scalar gaze” as an analytical approach useful for capturing veering practices in their social complexity. The article argues that favors (veze/štela, lit. relations, connections) in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina were a practice through which people fulfilled the demands of capitalist economy to be active, rather than a pre-capitalist excess that prevented “proper” development of the country into a neoliberal democracy. Zooming in and out and looking sideways between moral reasoning, internationally supervised structural changes of the job markets, and electoral politics, this article explores how the relational labor of favors reproduced moral selves, as well as hierarchy and inequality.

Drawing on ethnographic material from Gitanos of Spain and current EU Roma integration policies, we explore the contemporary construction of the Roma ethnic group category as a specific type of “stranger” in the context of the European neoliberal culture complex. Our argument is that this classificatory reconstruction can be seen to work as a cultural prerequisite for the socio-political shaping and management of the Roma as a neoliberal “stable stranger.” This new stranger is based on constructing Roma as a potential unused labor pool and as recent immigrants, in contrast to the Gitanos’ own ideology and locally grounded identity of self-employment and anti-proletarianism. The paradoxical consequence of the integration policies, therefore, is the potential pushing of the Gitanos further away from Spanish mainstream society.

More than 50 years after the writing of the papers assembled as Stone Age Economics, the author's voice has been silenced. That immense contribution has been the subject of numerous reassessments. The volume contains all his important work in economic anthropology. Each chapter is teeming with ideas, and even seasoned teachers in this field will usually discover something new each time they revisit it. Looking at it again this year, I was astonished to realize that I used to use this book for teaching first-year undergraduates. Even for the brightest young sparks in Cambridge, to require the completion within a week of an essay evaluating Marcel Mauss's The Gift (Mauss 2015 [1925]) in the light of the fourth chapter of Stone Age Economics (Sahlins 2004 [1972]) was asking rather a lot.

Rosita Armytage. 2020. Big capital in an unequal world: The micropolitics of wealth in Pakistan. London: Berghahn Books.

Ashley Mears. 2020. Very important people: Status and beauty in the global party circuit. New York: Princeton University Press.